The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  ‘Zachye?’

  ‘Correct, very correct,’ Mr Magara said, tearing a sinew off a bone with his teeth.

  Stanley and Felice were looking intently at Mr Magara.

  ‘Did he leave a message?’ Stanley asked.

  ‘No.’ He paused to suck on the cartilage at the end of the bone. ‘He just came to the door and asked where you were – but he called you Stanley, as if he knew you well.’

  He waved the bone about. ‘When I said you were in the capital he said nothing. He just walked away.’

  ‘Walked away?’

  ‘I shouted after him, “Mr Zachye, what do you want?” But he was gone. Do you know him?’

  ‘My brother – it might be my brother. It must be my brother.’ Michael thought that Stanley struggled to keep his voice from fracturing. ‘I’ve not seen him for many years.’

  ‘He was taller than you, although not as wide as me,’ Mr Magara said, slapping his flanks and looking round for appreciation. None came.

  ‘My brother was – is – taller than me. If it’s my brother then it’ll be an answer to our prayers. He’s estranged. He was missing. I believed he could be dead. Did he look well?’

  ‘He looked fit, but he was not well dressed. His clothes were shabby, very shabby. A man doesn’t come to speak to the District Administrator in those clothes unless he has no others.’

  ‘We must find him. Maybe he needs help. He just left?’ Stanley sounded incredulous.

  Mr Magara replied, ‘I’ll instruct my secretariat to ask if anyone has seen him but no one has reported him to me.’

  Michael saw Felice and Stanley acknowledging their hopes and fears with a glance.

  ‘He was a prodigal son, then?’ Mr Magara asked, tackling the next bone.

  ‘The prodigal son came back,’ Stanley said, ‘Zachye never did. My father would have killed any number of fatted calves in celebration if Zachye had returned.’

  The conversation never recovered after that, Mr Magara at last too satiated to speak and Stanley and Felice stunned by his news. Mrs Magara busied herself serving sweet tea. Michael had a pleasant discomfort from his stretched stomach. He tried to fill the silence by telling Mr Magara about the proposed excursion to the national park.

  Mr Magara guffawed. ‘Why pay to see animals? Pay to eat them, of course. But just to look? The world has become strange. Would you pay to look over your hedges in your country to see your Jersey cows and your Aberdeen bulls? Would you go on safari to your Lake District in a bus painted black and white to see your sheep dogs?’

  Stanley said, ‘We’d better go. Do you have any spare batteries? Our torch is nearly dead.’

  ‘I’ll walk you to your vehicle, have no fear,’ Mr Magara said, lifting himself with difficulty from his chair.

  ‘We came on foot – the hospital fuel’s running low.’

  Mr Magara tutted loudly. ‘I’d drive you back myself if my driver wasn’t drunk and asleep in his bed.’

  He found a powerful torch. As they left he came to the edge of the compound with them and said in a whisper, ‘Be very careful, there are bandits.’

  They walked back in silence, the torch providing what Michael knew was false comfort. Stanley swung it away from the path once to look for the source of some noise he had heard. As he swung it back Michael saw a black cockerel hanging from a branch.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Michael asked, a crawling sensation spreading across his shoulders.

  ‘Did you see something?’ Stanley asked.

  ‘I thought I saw a chicken.’

  Felice found this funny. ‘You’re going to get very excited in the game park.’

  ‘There are many chickens in Africa,’ Stanley said.

  ‘I assume they don’t roost by hanging upside down from a tree,’ Michael replied.

  Stanley scanned the bushes. ‘Where did you see it?’ He handed the torch to Michael.

  Searching with the beam, Michael saw nothing but an illuminated lattice of branches and their shadows behind: a ghostly tracery of dark matter.

  ‘It’s easy to mistake shapes for anything,’ Stanley said.

  ‘Must have been my imagination. I’m completely out of my element.’

  But he was convinced he had seen another fetish, and its disappearance when he tried to find it again was, quite frankly, disturbing. He remembered the incident on the aircraft, the grove in the forest by the lake, the vanishing oarsman. He speculated about a link between the cursed man with the feather and two identical feathered fetishes hundreds of miles apart. Then he got a grip. He firmly discounted the paranormal; the only linking factor was his irrational fear. Nevertheless, he was disturbed to be glad that it was Felice and Stanley with him as he walked on into the night. Ironic, really: his rational and scientific self feeling protected by the mission couple with their naïve religious faith; they who believed in a force bigger than whatever was out there in the night, and therefore that they were shielded in some way, or at least part of some greater purpose, whatever happened. Jesus is stronger, the driver by the lake had said. He remembered the child again. The torchlight created a tight tunnel of light along the path. He fought against a constriction around his chest – a black serpent of the night.

  When they arrived back he went straight to bed. He could hear Felice and Stanley talking in the living room. Stanley said, ‘Zachye could come back any time.’

  The door muffled Felice’s words but not their soothing tone. He imagined her putting her arm around Stanley, her skin warm on his. He groaned.

  Five

  On glass slides in the hospital laboratory smeared blood teemed with parasites, mycobacteria clogged slices of lung, cysts pocked sections of liver, faecal blobs moved – alive with worms. But the air was sharp and clean, sanitised with methylated spirits. At the other end of the microscope the eye of the lab officer flicked about: a hunter, out early, looking for microscopic raiders. Outside the lab a concrete path (protected from the mountain’s anabatic downpours by a roof of iron sheeting) ran between the single-storey brick wards that stepped in an orderly line down the hillside. Smaller buildings edged the compound: blackened kitchens, smoking from every vent, where relatives prepared food for the patients; a washhouse behind lines of tired white linen, spewing rivulets of soapy-grey water into a soak-away drain; and, at the far end of the hospital, the latrines, where the cyclical life of enteropathic parasites finally came to an end in the deep pits beneath.

  A woman sat on the grassy slopes below the path, cradling her sickly child in the puffs of her gaudy wrappings, while an elderly man leant on his stick, still as an old stork watching fish. The valley mists lay unwarmed but already mothers queued beside the outpatient and dispensary block to have their babies weighed in a sling suspended from a scale under the eaves. Nursing staff, in purple dresses and white aprons, crossed the compound hurrying to their duties, having received a short inspirational message from Stanley at morning prayers.

  In the cottage in the banana grove a short walk from the hospital a black cockerel crowed in Michael’s dreams. It continued crowing as he startled awake – fearful of its bronzed plumage. He heard hens clucking contentedly outside his window. A fresh light percolated through the mosquito netting, the suffusion bringing with it the dusty taste of the net and a faint aroma of baking bread. He stretched himself out from an embryonic position and let himself float on the soft mattress, coddled and relieved, the net like a veil over a cradle. The prospect of seeing Felice again delighted him. He made a half-hearted effort to suppress impinging thoughts of adultery. Then he surfaced to full wakefulness and curbed his fantasising, reminding himself that he was at risk of breaking trust with his hosts.

  When he passed through the house on his way out to the shower he saw that his breakfast was on the table. He lifted the fly-net to find a boiled egg (brown as a cappuccino), fresh bread, a rich yellow cube of butter and a sliced pawpaw, its jellied black seeds slipping down its juicy surfaces. Stanley and Felice had already gone to work
. The maid was in the sunny kitchen, singing to herself while she wiped the draining board of ants with the side of her hand.

  Michael found a note from Stanley on the table to say that if he was interested in seeing the hospital he was welcome to join him on a ward round at 8.30am. Felice would be spending the morning in the dispensary but would be returning home at midday. If he preferred to go for a walk, then the hill behind the hospital afforded spectacular views of the Rwenzori Mountains – on the rare occasions that they revealed themselves.

  Michael saw Stanley striding towards the topmost ward and caught up with him.

  ‘Ah, good. You’ve come to see the bush hospital.’

  Stanley looked like a man with a purpose, showing none of the anxiety of the previous evening. He wore a spotlessly white medical jacket with a pen and a mini-torch in the top pocket and a thick-piped black stethoscope in the side pocket.

  They entered the ward. Michael took some time to adapt from the glare outside, seeing first the whites of the patients’ eyes as they looked towards him. The beds resolved themselves next, packed tightly down each side of the ward, all occupied. Then he saw the patients on the floor lying on thin mattresses between the beds.

  ‘The very sick ones are on the beds. The rest sleep on the floor but spend most of the day outside,’ Stanley said as he flicked through the treatment charts on a table by the door. ‘We don’t turn anyone away.’

  Stanley made his way down the ward with Michael close beside him. Michael noticed that a deep reverential hush had fallen, as if Stanley was the chief’s medicine man and the patients waited for his augury. Michael remembered seeing a diviner at work when he was a child. He could picture Stanley in the full regalia: a tall leather hat, a long robe, bead anklets. Even in his white jacket, Stanley might be considered as inscrutable as any diviner of old: hearkening for malignant air in the lungs with his ear pipes, pulpating for lumpen infestations in the abdomen, sniffing for mephitic fetors, spying the mouth for violaceous eruptions, prying the genitalia for pestilent discharges. Michael wondered if he, the white man, added a priestly authentication to Stanley’s rituals. He and Stanley discussed the cases in a deeply sacerdotal language: trypanosomiasis, Wasserman reaction, transvesical prostatectomy, schistosomal, seroconversion, necrotizing gingivitis.

  ‘Maybe you can help me with this young man,’ Stanley said, stopping at the foot of a bed at the end of the ward where a gaunt patient, eyes large in their fleshless sockets, gave Michael a grimace for a smile, wincing at the movement – perhaps hurting his dry lips.

  ‘He’s wasting away, as you can see, and has chronic diarrhoea. Whatever I do he gets worse. We call it Slim.’ Stanley turned away from the patient. ‘These patients with Slim all die. I saw my first case two years ago but now we have many.’

  ‘Are other parts of the country affected?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Oh yes. In Rakai district near the border with Tanzania they’re burying many young people – male and female.’

  ‘An infective agent?’

  ‘I think it’s sexually transmitted but some theorise it has a mosquito vector. Many people here believe it’s the curse of witches – that’s why the hospital treatment can’t cure it.’

  ‘Well, I hope it doesn’t become a full blown epidemic.’

  ‘I fear it’s already become that,’ Stanley said. He described the investigations, the futile treatments, ‘and we’ve prayed’.

  Michael said, ‘I’m damned if I know what to suggest – unless he has something I can cut out. What are you going to do next?’

  They stood studying the patient for a moment and then Stanley said, ‘I’ll give him leave to take his last journey. His relatives will take him away on the bus this week. They wish to bury him at home. It’s cheaper for the relatives to transport him as a passenger than as a corpse.’

  The man lay there expectant, his large eyes adding poignancy to his plight. Michael felt unusually impotent: in his surgical practice he was able to pass on the hopeless cases to the radiotherapist or oncologist. He wanted to look away; to move on quickly; to give attention to the curable. He was a lemon in these situations; he had nothing to offer. Stanley stood quiet. He must be praying or something, thought Michael. Still Stanley stood there. The patient turned his gaze on Michael. Perhaps the white man had access to special technologies.

  ‘His name is Tomasi,’ Stanley said, quietly.

  Michael’s heart thumped. Tomasi? Surely not. But no, he was younger than Tomasi would be now. If he was still alive. Perhaps he was dead with the rest. A sucking emptiness opened up inside him; a void. He found himself blurting out, ‘But you’re a mission hospital. Don’t you try to convert him before he leaves? Save his soul, even though you can’t save his body?’ He was surprised at his outburst, and tried to wink at the nurse to show he was only teasing them, but she was not looking at him.

  Stanley turned slowly towards him with a puzzled look, as if having difficulty understanding the question. Eventually he said, ‘This man knows why we’ve tried to help him. Ruhanga will do the rest.’

  Michael looked on stiffly as Stanley sat down on the man’s bed and spoke to him in his language, quietly and without haste, all the while looking into the patient’s hungry eyes. The man lay still as he listened to Stanley, but Michael saw in his face the moment of shock, the recoil of fear, the collapse into resignation and then, as Stanley stood up, the giving out of something else; it could have been gratitude.

  ‘This is the men’s tuberculosis ward,’ Stanley said as they stepped into the next building, Michael having to move fast to keep up with Stanley’s brisk pace. ‘In this ward you’ve stepped back into your country in your grandfather’s generation. These men have to rest here for six months so we can make sure they take their medication each day and complete the course of treatment. Many live over a day’s walk away and we don’t have the field workers to visit their homes. The nurses watch each man swallow his tablets: in the markets tablets are sold individually.’

  ‘It’s magical stuff then,’ Michael said.

  ‘Yes, but if a man under our care dies then the traditional healers say it’s proof that the medicine doesn’t work or that it’s not enough on its own.’

  ‘It must work the other way around – when the traditional healer is unable to save a life,’ Michael said.

  Stanley shook his head emphatically. ‘No. The medicine man is only a medium. He’ll not claim he can cure; he claims only to uncover the offended ghost and tell what might appease it. He doesn’t say he’s more powerful than the ghost.’

  Stanley ran his hand down the tubes of the stethoscope that hung from his neck, thinking, and then said, ‘But Western medicine – scientific medicine – we claim its power over the unseen. When it fails the people conclude that a divination is needed as well. They like to get help from both worlds. My mother used to say, “We’re a shrewd people.” A small smile broke through. ‘I think you also have alternative medicines.’

  Michael smiled back. He was warming to Stanley.

  ‘Have you ever sought a divination?’ he asked, and then wondered if Stanley would welcome such a question in front of his nurse.

  Stanley seemed unabashed. ‘When I was young . . . it was sought for me.’ He pulled a shiny, green and yellow capsule out of his pocket and held it out in the palm of his hand. ‘When I first saw modern medicines I was fascinated. They looked like exotic beads from a far away place; like the beads that my ancestors bought from the Arab traders. The traditional healer’s medicines were ordinary in comparison: just familiar herbs wrapped in skin and bark – everyday objects. But these new medicines in their silver foils and glass bottles with strange colours were a wonder – irresistible to me because I’d lived only with nature until then. I understand that it’s the opposite in your country: people seek the natural.’ Stanley pointed to an X-ray on the nurses’ desk. ‘That’s another wonder: to see with such a penetrating eye.’

  ‘I didn’t expect you to have an X-ra
y machine,’ Michael said.

  ‘It’s very old. I try to avoid using it because I fear it shoots radiation in all directions. I’ve made a long lead so that I can fire it from outside the building.’

  Michael smiled, imagining Stanley with a cable stretching to the other side of the mountains to avoid the radiation flash.

  A man coughed down the ward. Stanley jolted as if suddenly aware that he’d been wasting time, and moved quickly to the first bed. He greeted each man briefly, passed a few words, checked the charts, asked questions of the nurse, listened to the men’s chests and wrote on the treatment cards.

  Michael found himself introduced to many medical antiquities as they passed on through the wards: a tetanus victim restrained by tight blankets, the crater-like ulcers of yaws, a case of rabies behind screens, a bubo of syphilis.

  ‘In Africa man has lived for the greatest number of generations, so the microbes have had plenty of time to learn how best to exploit us,’ Stanley said. ‘They’ve been successful: when my father was a child only fifty per cent of children reached five years.’

  When they stepped out of the lowermost ward into the sunshine, Michael saw that a multitude had surrounded the outpatient building and were hustling for a position by the door. A male dresser was trying to bring order, shouting out names, pushing back some while he pulled forward others. Babies cried. On the periphery of the crowd men lay patiently on bamboo and grass-mat stretchers, their bearers resting after long treks. The crowd saw Stanley and stopped jostling in order to follow his progress as he made his way to the door at the back of the clinic.

  ‘There must be three hundred people here,’ Michael said. ‘You’re not going to see them all, are you?’

  Stanley did not answer straight away. Michael saw that he had lost his purposeful expression and was looking about him, as if looking for someone. He collected himself soon enough. ‘I have assistants but end up seeing about half. Come in and observe if you wish.’